The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  Dylan had spoken many times about the heroes who moved him, and what was striking was that he used the same words as Dylan fans. “People have told me that they’ve heard a song of mine, and it’s changed their lives,” he told an interviewer once. “Now, I can only believe that or disbelieve it. But I know what it is to feel that because I’ve felt that way myself about some other people’s work.” Chunks of Dylan’s memoir are devoted to beautifully crafted testimonials to the musicians he loves. He once ran into 1950s singer Johnnie Ray and was starstruck. “He was like one of my idols, you know. I mean, I was speechless,” he said. “There I was in an elevator with Johnnie Ray. I mean, what do you say, you know?” Onstage at the Grammys to accept an award, Dylan described being a teenager and seeing his hero Buddy Holly play in Duluth. “I was three feet away from him . . . and he looked at me.” The year before he went to Mendips, Dylan appeared at the door of Neil Young’s boyhood house in Winnipeg. “Oh, oh, Neil Young fan alert,” the owner said, thinking this man in the leather pants and very expensive cowboy boots was another obsessive. At Sun Studios in Memphis, tour guides say Dylan strolled in one day while tourists were being shown around. He bent down to kiss the spot where Elvis stood while recording “That’s All Right” on July 5, 1954. Then he walked out. Someone chased after Dylan to gush about how much he loved him. “Well, son,” Dylan answered, “we all have our heroes.”

  When Dylan set out for New York in 1961, it was as much as a pilgrim as a budding musician. At nineteen, he had fallen under the spell of Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma drifter who penned “This Land Is Your Land” and more than a thousand other songs, the dust bowl radical who agitated on behalf of the downtrodden and sometimes played with a guitar that bore the words THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS. Listening to the records for the first time felt “like a million megaton bomb had dropped,” Dylan would write, “. . . like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room.” He read the book (Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory), perfected the sound (Okie), adopted the appearance (work clothes), and swiped the stories (ridin’ the rails).

  Then, learning that this mythical folk hero was actually still alive, Dylan hitched a ride east to meet him. But their encounter opened the young upstart’s eyes to something, an uncomfortable truth about fandom. What he learned from Guthrie in the flesh was that heroes were not gods. They were just men, as flawed as anyone.

  A few years later, when the tables were turned and Bob Dylan became famous the world over, sought after, idolized, labeled a prophet and a guru, he tried and tried to get his flock to see things his way.

  From the very start, it was a losing battle.

  2

  HOSTILITIES

  On a windy night in January 2011, Nina Goss and Charlie Haeussler took the train from their home in Brooklyn into Greenwich Village, where they had beers in the back room of the Kettle of Fish, the latest incarnation of a bar where Dylan and the rest of the folkies hung out in the early 1960s. Draining their drinks, they walked a few blocks south to a run-down brownstone on MacDougal Street. A neon sign hung over the door, with a moon and a guitar beneath cartoonish bubble letters reading CAFE WHA? As they walked down the stairs to a basement space, they passed pictures telling the story of the club—Jimi Hendrix, Bill Cosby, Bruce Springsteen. They found a booth and ordered another round.

  The Monday-night house band, Brazooka, was due onstage at eight-thirty, but Nina and Charlie were here for something more ethereal. Fifty years ago this very night, Dylan first crossed the George Washington Bridge, found his way to the Village, and strode down the same stairway to the same basement. He introduced himself to the manager and asked if he could perform, and the next thing he knew he was onstage playing a couple of songs. He said something to the unsuspecting crowd about how he was followin’ in the ramblin’ footsteps of Woody, travelin’ the country with just his guitar and his knapsack.

  Nina and Charlie had come to the club on the anniversary of Dylan’s first appearance in New York because they wanted to experience that flickering sense of history that haunts certain rooms. They were listening for an echo. But the space felt entirely without soul, and as the Brazilian outfit started shaking, Nina looked sour. She didn’t really connect. The past was the past. She could not reconstruct 1961; it was too far gone.

  Dylan arrived in a Chevy Impala. He had been hanging around Madison, Wisconsin, that January, and a friend knew a guy with a car who needed relief drivers for a road trip to New York, 950 miles away. Dylan eagerly signed on, and they made it without incident, though somewhere in New Jersey the car’s owner had heard more than enough Woody Guthrie from the kid with the acoustic guitar, the severe voice, and not a shred of common courtesy. “Shut the fuck up!” he finally said.

  He’d been at this Woody act for some months now. The transformation astounded those who knew him. He had become his idol so quickly; it seemed to happen in a couple of days. To be honest, the act got annoying, fast. Dylan would show up somewhere and drown out the partiers with his caterwauling. He would play the Guthrie whether you wanted him to or not. He would keep singing and strumming into the small hours when everyone else wanted to go to sleep.

  He was earnest, embarrassingly so. He would talk and talk and talk about traveling east, meeting Woody, making it big. Nobody believed he would do it.

  Guthrie had Huntington’s disease, and he had been decaying inside the walls of a depressing hospital in New Jersey, an asylum where the great folksinger was just another nut. Not long after Dylan arrived in New York, he took the bus an hour and a half south to the hospital. Guthrie suffered from debilitating spasms. He struggled to even light a cigarette. His voice was a rasp; he could barely be understood. But Dylan brought his guitar and sang Guthrie’s songs for him. Soon after, he sent a note to friends back in Minnesota. “I know Woody. I know Woody. I know him and met him and saw him and sang to him. I know Woody—Goddamn.”

  As much as he loved Guthrie’s music, what tipped it over into obsession was the book. Bound for Glory, the fictionalized autobiography Guthrie wrote in the early 1940s, begins on a train crammed with brawling stowaway hobos rolling across Minnesota. In the book, he gave voice to all sorts of ideas that would, in the 1960s, come to be called “Dylanesque.” “Things was starting to stack up in my head, and I just felt like I was going out of my wits if I didn’t find some way of saying what I thinking,” Guthrie wrote. He dismissed every “-ology” and “-ism.” His simple mission in life was to sing “songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.”

  Guthrie tells a long yarn about being mistaken for a sort of shaman after giving a few people common-sense solutions to their most vexing problems. Soon he finds a mob of roughnecks at his door. They want him to share some wisdom. He walks out onto his porch and says, “I ain’t no fortune teller. No more than you are. But I’ll tell ya what I see in my own head. Then ya can call it any name ya like.” Then he delivers his grand ideas for a better world—good jobs for every able body, better houses, more oil fields and more factories. The crowd hoots and snorts. That would not happen, no chance. “You ain’t no prophet!” they cry.

  Dylan was mesmerized. “Guthrie divides the world between those who work and those who don’t and is interested in the liberation of the human race and wants to create a world worth living in,” Dylan wrote decades later in his own memoir, recalling how, after finishing the book, he decided that he would become “Guthrie’s greatest disciple.” Dylan bought in to the whole program. It felt to Dylan as though this folksinger, this man he had never met, was telling him and him alone, I’ll be going away, but I’m leaving this job in your hands. I know I can count on you. Dylan felt called.

  He spent 1961 honing his music and his act in Greenwich Village, as eccentric a neighborhood as any he could find. In the nineteenth century it had been a fashionable quarter with shops and Greek Revival townhouses. By the turn of the century it had changed as Iris
h, German, and Italian immigrants arrived to work in warehouses and breweries and manufacturing lofts. In the 1910s the Village was a bohemian center, home to avant-garde art and experimental theater, a home for radicals, poets, and literary luminaries. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Village hosted the “New York School” of modernist poets and abstract expressionist painters. The beats flitted through. In 1953, poet Dylan Thomas spent his last days drinking, quite heavily, at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. A few years later when the other Dylan showed up, the Village was still a big tent, crammed with the weird, the hip, and the talented. He walked in on an eclectic music scene populated with jazz cats, bluesmen, bluegrass pickers, bongo players, and folksingers.

  Especially folksingers. Folk was having its moment, and the Village was ground zero. On Sundays, the musicians convened on Washington Square, a former potter’s field, and jammed for themselves and the crowds and the ghosts. In April 1961, the city tried to ban their weekly gatherings and the beatniks rioted on free-speech grounds. (They won.) Artists of every persuasion played at coffeehouses like the Gaslight, a former basement speakeasy and coal cellar that was filthy, dark, hot, and crawling with cockroaches. They watched and learned, borrowed and stole. They cross-pollinated. Everybody was on the make. Dylan happened to land at a moment when there was money in folk music.

  “He was a rough little pixie runt with a guitar,” singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott said. He looked so young. Maybe malnourished. His leg twitched, always. Onstage he carried himself like Charlie Chaplin. But he had ambition and uncanny instincts. He absorbed what was in the air. Folk buffs put him up and fed him while he played coffeehouses, and soon he was making an impression on his fellow musicians. Things started to happen. Not right away, but just about. In April, he opened for Mississippi blues singer John Lee Hooker. In September, the New York Times reviewed a show at Gerde’s Folk City and reported that Dylan was “bursting at the seams with talent.” In October, he signed a record deal with a big-league label, Columbia.

  He started writing songs by the bunches, wherever he was, on whatever he had at hand. One night in April 1962 he was sitting in a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street when he came up with the idea for the song that would make his name, once and forever. In the public mind, it would overshadow everything else he would ever do. He was twenty.

  At the café, there had been a long debate about civil rights for blacks in America. Dylan was not considered a political thinker around the Village, but he listened closely, and, as he told friends later, a thought flashed through his mind. The problem was not just racism, but the fact that most people didn’t speak out against it. Even those who meant well were guilty. As they went about their daily lives, their silence implicated them. He went home and dashed off some verses.

  The song asked a series of societal questions. How long before all men are free? How long until war ends? And most pressing, how long can people act like they don’t see the injustice? The answer, as anyone with a pulse would hear in the coming years, and for decades after that, was “blowin’ in the wind.” The song sounded timeless, world-weary, like an ancient hymn. The older folksingers griped that it was naïve, too simple. But it had subtle power. It was a big song, bottomless. It left it to listeners to find the answers, which were there for anyone to grab, and yet, paradoxically, always swirling just out of reach. The central image seemed to grow out of a brief passage in Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, when he stands in a skyscraper window watching a scrap of newspaper fluttering outside, “curving over backwards and sideways, over and over.” Guthrie prays for it to survive long enough (“blow little paper, blow!”) to be picked up by someone and read. “I’m blowing,” he goes on, identifying with this piece of litter, “and just as wild and whirling as you are, and lots of times I’ve been picked up, throwed down, and picked up; but my eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.”

  Dylan dashed off the first draft of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a hurry. Quickly realizing what he had, he rushed over to Gerde’s Folk City on West Fourth Street near Washington Square, where folksinger Gil Turner was hosting the evening hootenanny. Dylan did a rendition for Turner, who loved it and asked if he could sing it himself, right then, immediately, when he went on stage. So Dylan showed him the chords, jotted down the lyrics, and watched proudly as Turner debuted the song to a stunned audience. A year later, Peter, Paul and Mary released it and, bolstered by heavy radio play, the single sold 320,000 copies in eight days and peaked at number two on the charts.

  It was a song perfect for its time. The youth movement was blooming. The teens and twentysomethings of the early 1960s were soaking in new music, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, and raising their voices in a politically tumultuous age. These kids were shaking off the buttoned-up confinement of the 1950s and demanding social change. In a few months they would spend thirteen days fearing nuclear annihilation. In a year they would hear Martin Luther King Jr. say “I have a dream.” Later, they would protest the Vietnam War. Behind it all, “Blowin’ in the Wind” played. It was an iconic anthem that tapped into the zeitgeist, and would came to define it. And the song branded Dylan, once and for all, as a folkie, as some sort of political activist, as a man who knew something that eluded everybody else. Like Guthrie before the rabble in Bound for Glory. By asking the questions, he implied that he had the answers, that he carried some special knowledge, some hidden truth about the world.

  From then on, everybody wanted to know what it was.

  2

  He was a kid, only twelve, when he first heard the name Bob Dylan and discovered that this was the new folk hero behind the anthem floating in the air. In the summer of 1963, Peter Stone Brown plunged into Dylan’s deep well of words. Now here he was, almost an old man, into his sixties, his face craggy and his frizzy hair gray, and still he hadn’t drunk it dry.

  He lived in Philadelphia on a street of brick row houses between Broad and the Italian Market. His walls looked like they had never seen a fresh coat of paint. The place had the feel of a crash house, with amps, guitar cases, and power cords running in every direction, piles of videos, a bike in the dining room. He was single; he never got close to marriage. He couldn’t say he loved his job. He had dreamed of a music career and put in the effort: writing the songs, assembling the bands, releasing a proper record. But it never took off, and he settled for whatever he could find to pay the bills. So he was the record store manager who could tell you anything about music, or at least about the sort of music you wanted to hear if you had taste. Folk, blues, country, rockabilly. The good shit. He was a courier, which had its adventures. He was once tasked to deliver a human heart. It looked like an artichoke. For years he wrote a music column for one of Philly’s alternative papers. He survived for a time by transcribing raw reality-show footage for producers, which paid ten cents a line. On the good days the strangers on his videotapes said “Okay!” a lot. But even in the reality-television industry there were cutbacks, and soon he was hunting for work again.

  If it paid to know Dylan backward and forward, Peter would have been a wealthy man. When he was growing up, everybody liked Dylan in his circle of teen friends. But Peter distinguished himself with his freakishly detailed knowledge. Later, on Internet forums and private chat rooms and Facebook, he established himself as a knowledgeable correspondent. (It didn’t hurt his credibility when people found out that his brother, Tony, a talented bassist, had played on Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks in 1974.) Unlike other Web correspondents, he usually knew what he was talking about, and he was not at all shy about letting people know it.

  In a way, Peter had no say in the matter. It seems inevitable that Dylan would have caught his attention. Peter was raised by secular, ultraliberal Jews. His great-grandfather was part of a wave of Russians who fled after brutal pogroms spar
ked by the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. He emigrated to an agricultural colony established and funded by a railroad magnate in rural southern New Jersey. Peter’s mother was deeply involved with the Anti-Defamation League. His father was active in Democratic politics in Philadelphia, and the household subscribed to the National Guardian, a radical liberal newspaper founded after World War II to oppose McCarthyism and advocate for the expansion of New Deal policies. When the first black family moved onto their street, the Browns went out of their way to welcome them. The family was so left-wing that his mother and father once called their boys together to instruct them what to do if the FBI came knocking: “Say nothing.” The Cold War was on, and it was a scary time to be a dissenting voice.

  Of course, the Browns listened to folk. Peter’s mother had an f-hole acoustic guitar that she played a little, and she counted among her college friends Bess Lomax Hawes of the folklorist Lomax family, who in the 1940s sang with Guthrie in the Almanac Singers. For the Browns, going to a Pete Seeger concert was like a high holy day: The entire family would dress in their best clothes. Peter played his parents’ 78s over and over and over again, Leadbelly, the Weavers, Paul Robeson, the Almanacs. Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking with the uuu-nion!

  His mother died when he was ten. Peter’s father remarried—“another left-wing Jew”—and Peter went off to the sixth grade in the alternative school where she taught, Miquon School. It was a very different place from the public schools he had attended. For one thing, some of the teachers had been blacklisted by the city schools when they refused to sign loyalty pledges in the McCarthy era. The students were allowed to wear jeans, which was not the norm at the time. They led the school assemblies and called the teachers by their first names, erasing the usual boundaries of authority. No grades were issued. They debated current events in the classroom. Miquon taught kids to think, not memorize. Peter remembered a field trip to the docks to watch the stevedores work. On the way back, the bus took the kids through the slums.